Google Introduces 'ImageFX', Its Very Own AI Image Generator, And Puts It Into Bard

The AI field was dull and quiet, and the buzz it created mostly happened within its own field, and rarely reach far beyond its own audience.

But when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT as a AI chatbot tool, the internet was quickly captivated. This is because the AI is able to do a wide range of tasks, including writing poetry, technical papers, novels, and essays.

And when other tech companies are starting to use the technology, or create similar ones, Google began to worry.

And when OpenAI starts monetizing ChatGPT with ChatGPT Plus, Google was certain that it had to move fast.

Following the CEO Sundar Pichai's "code red" that brought back Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google got too carried away, and was too ambitious.

By hurrying things up, and doing things in a rush, Google made Bard a $100 billion mistake.

But after Bard was properly ready, the rest became history.

This time, Google, still building on the hype, is giving Bard a significant update.

Catching up to other chatbots that are also able to generate images, like Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus with GPT-4 and DALL-E 3 integration, and to better compete with dedicated ones, like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and some others, Google introduces what it calls the 'ImageFX' AI.

What it does, is giving Bard the ability to generate AI images on the fly.

ImageFX lets users create images with simple text prompts so people can play around with generative AI, with the feedback going directly back to Google engineers.

This AI joins Google’s other AI creation tools, like the MusicFX and the TextFX, which were launched in 2023.

By embedding ImageFX to Bard, the chatbot, which is now powered by Google’s Gemini Pro large language model, is becoming even more capable.

Thanks to Google's massive resources of both data and hardware, ImageFX, which is powered by Imagen 2, is made available at no cost.

AI image generation tools have came under fire after sexually explicit fake photos of Taylor Swift flooded X social media.

While it’s largely unknown which platforms the 'creators' used to generate those images, the images that went viral have made even more people to realize the existence of such tools.

In response to this, tech companies have started to lock down their image generating platforms, and put more restrictions on them.

The same goes for Bard, which Google said, is "designed with responsibility in mind."

The company said that all photos generated through ImageFX shall be marked by SynthID and follow Google’s AI principles and guardrails.

The company’s watermarking feature shall be baked into the pixels of the photos, helping to indicate that the images are AI-generated.

These approaches are meant to prevent the AI from being abused, and made to generate images that depict violence, offensive, or sexually explicit content.

Besides giving Bard a notable update, Google is also expanding the chatbot to more than 40 languages in more than 230 countries.

This is huge update to the previous version, which only worked in English and was available in 170 countries.

Google also expanded the double-check feature to 40 languages, which lets users evaluate responses by automatically searching the internet to support or contradict content.